After Kelric completed the document, he encrypted the file and sent it to the El’s Legal mod. It took only a moment before Legal sent a message back to his console: Marriage Closed.
Ixpar, I won’t forget you, he thought. He copied the document to the tau missiles, programmed their security, and launched them in a stealth pattern. When they were safely off, he erased the evidence of his work from all the flotilla EIs.
Then he was done. He folded his arms on the console and laid down his head, closing his eyes. A tear leaked out and slid over his cheek. He had ten years to “return from the dead” to Ixpar, but he knew almost no chance existed of that happening.
He might be dead to his Coban family now, but at least he had done what he could to protect them.
5
Chrysalis Emergence
Kelric spread throughout space, using sensors on every ship in Maccar’s flotilla. He sailed the seas of dust, tasted oscillating fields, swirled in the cosmic ray flux. The quality of the sensors, the clarity of the stimulation—he reveled in the sheer exhilaration of becoming an entire flotilla.
For all that he had lost, he had gained this. He loved it. This was why he had made such a good test pilot. Alone with the vast radiant seas of energy and wonder, he came alive.
His thought rumbled: Update systems check.
Statistics updated, the Corona answered. It refreshed his mindscape, providing displays about all ten ships.
“Commander Garlin?” The voice of Lieutenant Ty Rillwater, the communications officer, murmured in space around him.
Attending, Kelric answered. The Corona digitized his thought and sent the data to Ty’s console, which turned it into speech. His words came out of her console as if he were part of the ship’s EI.
“Kelric, don’t do that!” Ty protested. “It gives me the jee-zeebs.”
Smiling, he thought, Translate “jee-zeebs.” The Corona sent his inquiry to her console.
Ty groaned. “Stop it! You sound like a computer.”
I am a computer, he thought. Did you have a message for me?
“We’ll hit the border zone in about thirty minutes,” she said.
I’ll be ready. He turned his focus inward. Corona, give me your most recent data on the border surface between the Skolian Imperialate and Eubian Concord. I’m interested in the area where we will cross into Trader space.
Done.
His mindscape formed into a new display, giving him a 3-D map of the border zone. A red volume filled the top of the map, indicating Trader space. The surface separating it from Skolian space continually shifted as the Corona made adjustments. A few of its revisions came from the scant data it received from other starships or outposts, but most were its own predictions on how boundaries were fluctuating in the current chaos.
According to their most recent data, the Traders had no outpost in this region and ISC had a small naval base. Kelric hoped the base still existed; it would increase their chances of safe passage and he might learn more from it about the current state of ISC.
Right now they were traveling in inversion. To invert, they added an imaginary component to their speed. Making speed complex removed the light-speed singularity from the equations of special relativity. The ship went “around” light speed the way a hovercar might leave the road to go around an infinitely high pole. Beyond the pole, they resumed their journey—at superluminal speeds, a realm of the bizarre.
A superluminal ship could go into the past. With a longing so intense it hurt, Kelric wished he could go back and stop the deaths of his family. If only. But every ship that had tried returning to normal space prior to when it inverted either failed or vanished, possibly into an alternate universe where it couldn’t meddle with its own causality.
Even if he did somehow go into his past, the need for consistency would probably make it impossible to alter history. It was the time analog of a mundane situation, his magcar passing a slower car. To him, his car would stay still while the slow car went backward. People in the slow car thought they stayed still while he went forward. But they all saw the cars end up in the same place. Their view of how it happened differed, but was consistent. No paradoxes. So it was with time. Events had to be consistent whether he ran the reel of his life forward or backward. He couldn’t undo what had happened, and wishing for the impossible only made his grief hurt more.
Superluminal travel bedeviled the flotilla. With no web, how did ships converse? Beam light back and forth? Useless. It could never catch up. Throw tachyons? As long as the particles remained superluminal, they could hop, skip, and jump all over time. Then there was time contraction and space dilation; at FTL speeds, the faster their ship went, the faster their time passed and the longer they stretched out relative to slower objects. A crew didn’t notice on their own ship because they were at rest relative to it. But no two ships or particles moved at the same rate, and at such humongous speeds even small differences had big effects. How did you talk to ships smeared out across light-years, with time running at different rates on all of them? It was a mess.
Maccar regularly had Anatakala drop the ships into real space so Ty could try contacting the ISC base. In the normal universe nothing went faster than light, so no one expected a timely answer from the base when they were several light-months out from the border zone. As they drew within light-days and then light-hours of the border, and still received no response, concern increased. On Kelric’s map, the Corona finally deleted the icon it had used to denote the base.
Only a few light-minutes from the border, they dropped into real space again. The red volume on Kelric’s map had expanded to fill most of the display.
Show me space, he thought.
The map vanished, replaced by a simulation so realistic, he felt as if he were arrowing through the void himself. The flotilla ships registered on his sensors as they dropped out of inversion, their formation spread out in time and space. However, they hadn’t been superluminal long enough for the lack of communications to seriously disrupt their formation.
Nothing marked the border between Skolian and Trader territory: no space buoys or patrol ships, not even a trace of debris from the vanished ISC station.
I’m not getting a thing, Kelric thought. The ship sent his voice to the bridge crew by way of their consoles. No hostile forces, human or drone. Nothing but dust and cosmic rays.
“Nothing here either,” Ty said. “No response to hails.”
“Nothing on regular sensors,” Anatakala added.
“Continue your scans,” Maccar said. “Commander Anatakala, maintain course.”
“Aye, sir,” she said.
They sailed through the border region without a blip of excitement.
“Entering Trader space,” Anatakala said.
Still no trace of other forces, Kelric thought.
“Nothing on comm,” Ty said.
“Stay alert,” Maccar said. “Until we leave Trader space, I want you all to operate as if we’re in emergency mode.”
A murmur of Aye, sirs answered him.
Kelric expanded his range, exploring as far afield as the sensors on the flotilla ships could manage. We’re clear for inversion, he told Maccar, using the bridge channel. He felt relief flicker through the crew. Once a ship inverted, it became almost impossible to detect or catch. It was when they dropped into real space that they were vulnerable.
“Prepare to invert,” Maccar said.
Marko Jaes, the officer in charge of engineering, spoke on the bridge channel: “Ready on your order, sir.”
“Invert,” Maccar said.
Vertigo hit Kelric as the Corona twisted out of real space. It wrenched his mental equilibrium. Nausea surged over him, another reminder of his depleted condition. Going into inversion had never bothered him before.
“Inversion complete,” Jaes said.
“Optimizing spacetime route,” Anatakala said. “Captain, I’d like to push us as close to transcendence as possible.”
“Go ahe
ad,” Maccar said.
At the word transcendence, Kelric froze. What the bloody hell was she talking about?
Taking a breath, he tried to relax. He hoped no one noticed his reaction. By transcendence, Anatakala simply meant infinite speed, an odd concept certainly, but not one that had deserved his extreme response. A superluminal ship could never go slower than light, but in theory no upper limit existed. In practice, they never reached transcendence: errors piled up at too rapid a rate. But they could go wicked fast, and the less time they spent in Trader space the better.
Kelric couldn’t shake his chill, though—for transcendence also had a far harsher meaning. Trader Aristos used it for the heightened state they reached with the favored pleasure slaves they called “providers.”
It was hard for Kelric to believe the Aristos had risen to power only a few centuries ago. To him, they were a monolithic force, implacable and timeless. Yet they came from a well-meant project. The intent had been to protect empaths, to engineer changes in their brains so they could mute the painful emotions they picked up from others. One glitch developed. Just one. That unexpected side effect changed human history. It created the Aristos. Anti-empaths.
When an Aristo’s brain picked up painful emotions, it protected itself by sending the neural signals that defined those emotions to its pleasure centers. So the Aristo transcended. It happened only if they had a large neural interaction with the sender. In other words, the sender had to be a psion, the stronger the better. Aristos called their captive psions “providers,” kept them in luxury, and even claimed they loved them. It fooled no one. They achieved transcendence by giving pain to other human beings.
Kelric had only to hear the word transcendence and he broke out in a sweat. No one else on the bridge seemed troubled, though. But then, none of them had a Kyle rating above two, and three was the minimum for a psion.
His rating was off the scale.
Kyle ratings above ten were hard to measure because such a psion was rarer than one in ten billion people. The sum total of humanity numbered about three trillion, but few worlds had more then ten billion, so statistics couldn’t be done on much larger populations.
Kelric sometimes wondered how it would feel to be normal, to have people see him just as a man, rather than a scarce resource. The rarity of psions came about because the recessive Kyle genes that produced them often had lethal mutations as well. The more Kyle genes in a person’s DNA, the worse the situation. The stronger the psion, the higher their Kyle rating and the fewer of them that existed. Rhon psions carried the full complement, making the Rhon the most powerful psions—and rare to the point of extinction.
Kelric’s family were the only fertile, viable Rhon psions in three civilizations. Desperate to keep a supply for the Triad, the Assembly had tried creating more in the lab. When that failed, they pushed, cajoled, coerced, and threatened the Ruby Dynasty into having as many children as possible. As far as Kelric knew, ten of the Rhon still lived, counting himself and his daughter. Without pressure to increase their numbers, though, they would probably be rarer than one in a sextillion, giving them ratings above twenty-one.
Of one thing he had no doubt: here in Trader territory he was one of the only free telepaths among nearly two trillion people.
Maccar interrupted his thoughts. “Commander Garlin, are you still on sensors?”
“Yes, sir.” Kelric turned his attention back to his work.
As Anatakala navigated, Kelric monitored their progress. Her skill impressed him. During inversion, the flotilla formation lost cohesion. Anatakala had to minimize its spread in space and time. The computers did the calculations, but her guidance and insight were what made the difference.
Maccar’s decision to drop out of inversion at regular intervals made Kelric uneasy. He understood the reasoning; they went sublight to clean up errors and tighten their formation. The longer the flotilla stayed superluminal, the more it was spread out in time and space when the ships came out of inversion. If the spread became too large, how could the ships defend the Corona?
But dropping into real space made them vulnerable. If pirates attacked, they would probably rob Maccar of his cargo and then let almost everyone go; with a slave population in the trillions, Aristos had no need of more taskmakers, particularly not Skolians who were used to freedom and caused more trouble than they were worth.
Providers, however, were another matter. Their rarity gave them immense value. Kelric grimaced, knowing he would bring a phenomenal price on the Trader slave markets.
So protect yourself, he thought.
An idea came to him. It might not work, but it was worth a try. He sat still, centering his thoughts. Then he submerged deeper into the Corona, growing even more aware of its systems. He circulated air, prepared food, monitored temperature. Deeper still and he became pulses of light and electrons. He expanded into space. Particles with complex energies, masses, and charges flowed around him. Stars streamed past in banners of light, seen not in a single instant but during a range of times. He expanded further, searching, searching …
Ah, no. Pain lanced his head. He paused, resting. He didn’t retreat to the Corona, though. If he succeeded in this, it would be worth the strain to his injured mind.
When the pain receded, he resumed his search, pushing further into space, farther …
There! He touched another mind. An EI. A ship. He had contacted the Zettel, the dreadnought in Maccar’s flotilla.
Identify, the Zettel thought.
Commander Garlin, on the Corona, Kelric answered.
Psiberweb link established, the Zettel told him.
Psiberweb? An interesting interpretation. He could see why the dreadnought made that assumption. In a sense, he had recreated a tiny bubble of psiberspace, at least enough to form one link. He wondered how far he could push it before the strain on his mind became too great and the tenuous bubble collapsed.
After resting a few microseconds, he continued expanding his sphere of awareness in both space and time. He found a frigate and set up a link with its EI. He hit another frigate, and another, until he encompassed the entire flotilla. He couldn’t link all ten ships to one another: that would require 10! or 3,628,800 links. But he could hold the ten links from his mind to the ships.
Kelric sent a message to Maccar, the bridge crew, Marko Jaes in Engineering, and the yeoman who kept Maccar’s logs: Flotilla psilink established.
“What the whizzle?” Ty exclaimed. At the same time, Steil said, “Garlin, what are you doing?” and Anatakala asked, “Kelric, is that you?”
Maccar spoke. “Commander Garlin, explain yourself.”
Kelric grinned. I set up a psilink among your ships. Now you don’t need to drop out of inversion as often.
A full five seconds went by before anyone answered. Eons passed for Kelric, submerged as he was in the light-speed flickerings of EI brains.
Finally Maccar said, “That’s impossible. You need the psiberweb to create such a link.”
I created a psiberspace bubble, Kelric thought. Ten links. It’s all I can hold, though, and I don’t know for how long.
“Well, I’ll take a launch off a lily pad,” Ty said.
“I wasn’t aware ISC had such technology,” Maccar said.
“Nor I,” Steil said.
Kelric caught their mental undercurrents. They wondered if he had just revealed secured ISC data. He hadn’t, nor would he ever do so. As far as ISC had known in his time, it was impossible to create such a link without the web. Or so they had thought. Apparently being Rhon had unexpected advantages.
It isn’t ISC tech, he thought. I just did it.
“Can you coordinate the flotilla?” Maccar asked.
I can give Anatakala their positions, both temporal and spatial. I’m too far extended for more, but if she makes the corrections and feeds them into my mindscape, I can transmit them to the other ships.
“Anatakala?” Maccar asked.
“No problem,” she said. “I
’m setting it up now.”
Soon her data was pouring into his mind. As they worked, his headache increased. It wasn’t unbearable, though. He wasn’t sure what caused it. When he used the Kyle centers, his brain apparently made neural connections his mind translated as pain. It was a warning, like an alert system, letting him know he needed treatment.
But other considerations motivated him now. He intended to make it out of Trader space with his freedom.
“Navigation, do the drop,” Maccar said.
“Aye, sir,” Anatakala said. “Entering real space … now!”
With a rush of relief, Kelric relaxed. The psilink he had nurtured for the past few hours dissolved, but it didn’t matter. As the ships entered normal space, they regained communications.
“Holy Mother!” Ty exulted. “What a job, Kelric!”
“Not bad,” Steil murmured.
“Captain Maccar,” Anatakala said. “The flotilla formation has ninety-eight percent cohesion.” She exuded satisfaction. “We’re only thirty light-minutes from our destination.”
The usually restrained Maccar gave a whistle. “Commander Garlin, that was damn good work.”
Kelric smiled. “Thank you, sir.” Even he hadn’t expected that he could take them all the way to Sphinx Sector. But they had made it here without leaving inversion once, when normally Maccar would have had called ten to fifteen drops.
They entered real space at 80 percent light speed and dumped velocity as they approached their destination, slowing to mundane speeds. A space habitat grew on the display in his mindscape, a gleaming sculpture of nested wheels four kilometers across. Rather than spokes, a sparkling lace stretched from the innermost wheel to the hub. Closer in, the “lace” resolved into an enormous web of struts and ringed cables. Mirrors caught radiance from a distant blue-white star and shined their captured luminance into the habitat. Golden spires reached out from the hub, dumping heat, glittering with reflected light. The overall effect was gorgeous, like a city shimmering in space.
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